Tag Archive for: Islamic Law

Tirmidhi’s Kitāb al-‘Ilal – annotated translation By Jonathan Brown

Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī is one of the most influential figures in the Sunni hadith tradition. Born in about 210/825 near the city of Tirmidh on the northern bank of the Oxus River in modern-day Uzbekistan, he traveled widely in northeastern Iran, Iraq, and the Hejaz to study with the most sought-af ter scholars and transmitters of hadiths in his day. These included scholars who had themselves travelled widely in the quest to hear hadiths, such as Qutayba b. Saʿīd of Balkh (d. 240/854), as well as scholars who would become famed for their mastery of both hadith and law, such as al-Dārimī of Samarqand (d. 255/869) and Abū Dāwūd (author of the famous Sunan, d. 275/889). They also comprised the most respected masters of hadith criticism, including Muslim b. Ḥajjāj of Nishapur (author of the Ṣaḥīḥ, d. 260/875) and Abū Zurʿa al-Rāzī of Rayy (d. 264/878). But his most famous and influential teacher was none other than al-Bukhārī (author of the Ṣaḥīḥ, d. 256/870). At some point al-Tirmidhī returned to his hometown, where he died in 279/892 at around seventy years of age. Today his grave can be visited just north of Tirmidh in Uzbekistan, enclosed in an idyllic brick mausoleum built in the old Samanid style and frequented by local pilgrims. Al-Tirmidhī’s legal and theological leanings are clear in his works. Though he predated the solidification of the four schools of law, he identified with the general legal and theological tradition that he refers to as the ‘People of hadith’ (ahl al-ḥadīth). Notably, he also refers to this group as the ‘People of the Sunna and the Community’ (ahl alsunna wa’l-jamāʿa)-perhaps the earliest recorded instance of a scholar identifying himself with this designation. 1 Al-Tirmidhī describes this group as looking to exemplars like Mālik (d. 179/796), Sufyān b. ʿUyayna (d. 196/811), ʿAbdallāh b. al-Mubārak (d. 181/797), and Isḥāq b. Rāhawayh (d. 238/853). But the most influential figure in al-Tirmidhī’s theological universe was al-Bukhārī’s teacher and the pivot of the Ahl al-Sunna in Baghdad, Aḥmad Ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855). Al-Tirmidhī’s legal views

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Women in Hadith Literature: Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women – Feryal Salem

Abstract:

Ḥadīth literature is rich with its references to women from the ancient past as well as those from the Prophet Muḥammad’s contemporary period. A study of the way in which women are portrayed and referenced in ḥadīth texts provides a unique glimpse into the roles women played for the narrators of these prophetic traditions. Women in the ḥadīth literature can be divided into four primary categories: (1) women whose stories are told from the past; (2) stories, narratives, and references to the wives of the Prophet whose rank as “Mothers of the Believers (ummahāt al- muʾminīn),” earned them a distinctive role as instructional models; (3) women who were considered Companions of the Prophet or saḥābiyyāt; and fnally (4) statements and references to women as a general category without specifc references to any par- ticular individual

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“Decolonial translation: destabilizing coloniality in secular translations of Islamic law.” Journal of Islamic Ethics 5 (2021): 250-77 – Lena Salaymeh

“Contemporary Islamic legal studies—both inside and outside the Muslim world— commonly relies upon a secular distortion of law. In this article, I use translation as a metonym for secular transformations and, accordingly, I will demonstrate how secular ideology translates the Islamic tradition. A secular translation converts the Islamic tra- dition into “religion” (the non-secular) and Islamic law into “sharia”—a term intended to represent the English mispronunciation of the Arabic word شر يعة(sharīʿah). I explore the differences between historical Islamic terms and secular terms in order to demonstrate that coloniality generates religion and religious law; in turn, these two notions convert شر يعة(sharīʿah) into “sharia” in both Arabic and non-Arabic languages. Consequently, the notion of “sharia” is part of a colonial system of meaning”

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Justice, Nonaggression, and Military Ethics in Islam – Asma Afsaruddin

“In the sixteenth century, the Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria helped de- velop the principle of noncombatant immunity in Europe, which today has become a hallmark of modern international law. This principle is foregrounded in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols enacted in 1949 that form the core of in- ternational humanitarian law, as well as in the Nuremberg Charter of 1943 that deals with war crimes. In his legal work, de Vitoria explicitly identified those who should be considered noncombatants and given protection during military combat: women and children, agricultural laborers, travelers, and the civilian population in general. In his conception of a universal law, the seventeenth-century Spanish jurist Las Casas similarly emphasized the need to protect women and children, religious functionaries, serfs, and other noncombatants during war. Interestingly, the requirement that these categories of noncombatants should be protected during armed combat was already well entrenched within the Islamic law of nations or international law (known as siyar in Arabic) that had crystallized by the eighth century”

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Ibn al-‘Arabī: The Doorway to an Intellectual Tradition

The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Law

Abstract:

“One of the defining features of contemporary moral philosophy in nearly all its guises is the lack of serious concern for metaphysics—not as a discipline in itself, but as a necessary foundation for ethics. One should not mistake the fashionable project of “evolutionary ethics” for an attempt to tie morals to metaphysics, rather than seeing it more accurately as a program for burying ethics in the quicksand of current biological fan- cy. Nor should one, for instance, see in existentialism a serious concern for metaphysical underpinnings rather than what amounts to no more than a series of denials of the truths that used to undergird moral think- ing.2 Again, one sees in the various forms of liberal ethics that dominate the academy—consequentialism, contractualism, deontology—an almost”

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Bidayat Al-Hidaya by Imam Al-Ghazali

Beginning of Guidance

By Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali.  Translated by M. Abul Quasem